The Yemima Method as a Contemporary-Hasidic-Female Movement

This paper focuses on "The Yemima Method," a method for conscious life that has become an Israeli spiritual movement over the last thirty years. As far as I know, this is the first effort to depict this phenomenon and locate it along religious, spiritual, sociological, and theoretical axes.¹

After describing the method itself and the movement born and elaborated around it, I shall make two claims: The first is that "The Yemima Method" is a kind of contemporary-Hasidic-female movement; to prove this I shall point out the elements resembling main features of the "original" Hasidism, that of Rabbi Israel Baal-Shem-Tov. The second is that "The Yemima Method" is a kind of contemporary-Hasidic-female movement and, moreover, bears a significant affinity to feminist religiosity, to the ways in which some feminist theologians articulate religious life.

Most of this article is text based, and the methodology is, therefore, exegetical, hermeneutical, and phenomenological. The texts of "The Yemima Method" are mainly unpublished manuscripts, since part of the method involves writing down the lesson while participating in study groups. Nevertheless, access to these manuscripts is unlimited; actually, I have many of them in my own handwriting. In addition, I use internet texts and personal insights, including my own, gleaned as a practitioner of the method over the last fifteen years. The advantage of a study into a contemporary movement is the amount we can learn not solely about the lore itself, but also about its ways of reception and the process of its acceptance.² I have no pretensions at sociological-anthropological research, though I do apply some insights learned from the scholars of that domain. It should be noted that the Yemima method can be examined through different perspectives, the almost obvious being the flourishing of many groups/practices for well-being in the context of the too wide term "new age."³ It is indeed tempting to analyze Yemima's method through the paradigm of contemporary spiritual practices.⁴ Without denying this possibility and its fruitfulness, as well as other optional paradigms, I prefer to focus on the above mentioned two tangents: Hasidim and Feminism. Each of these encounters the Yemima method at a different point, and sometimes the lines converge for a while. I choose this framework firstly as I am interested in all three domains—the Yemima method, Hasidic and Feminist—and secondly because examining these domains can sharpen insights about each and about the gaps and bridges between them.

"The Yemima Method"

Yemima Avital was born in 1929 in Casablanca and moved to Israel at the age of twenty. A teacher by profession, she studied psychology and literature at Tel Aviv University.⁵

At some point she began to help people through a kind of healing. At first, she met people privately and then began to teach a group of students the method given to her, so she said, from "above". Her loyal following of students came to her for help in dealing with life's challenges. Her enormous personal charisma was a huge draw, as was her eclectic method of teaching, according to her students' reports.

In 1977 she founded the Ma'ayan Institute in Tel Aviv where she taught her "Cognitive Thinking" method, now known as the "Yemima Method." She moved to Herzliya, where the Ma'ayan Institute still operates today. Over her years of teaching she distanced herself more and more from her audience: first, she used to sit with her students; then, she covered her face with a scarf while teaching; and finally moved to sit half a floor above the listeners. She said that she "sees" too much about her disciples, and therefore takes distance in order to be able to communicate with them.

Over all those years of teaching she devoted two days a week to healing and prayers for sick people who needed her help. They came to visit her, and she traveled to hospitals, standing in prayer near the patient's bed.

A few years before her death at seventy, she started to prepare for the day after. She qualified...